I very well know the advantages of known and proven software like Jabber
or IRC but they are not very popular. IRC is too weird for users and for Jabber you need an account (Prosody even suggests to take open
registration down for security). On the other hand, and especially for
less techy users (maybe out of reach for tildes but maybe in for open software) Discord or Telegram are attractive for being so visually
driven and easy to use, even across platforms.

On the other hand, back in the day of the first web, people also used
the WWW to chat on chat-rooms and today we have websockets that can work across platforms. I was thinking that perhaps for some less nerdy people
a web chat that works on mobile phones as well could be a good option to
chat on a non tracked environment or at least for us and our less techy friends. I just rewatched this 2 years old tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD7FnbI76Hg and I'd love to make it work
for people who are in the fediverse. I think the fediverse is an
interesting niche of people who are not necessarily tech-savvy but might
be willing to leave centralized platforms.

What do you think? I think the code is good but it needs some tweaks to
allow for administrating users but it seems like it can be added easily.

Don't get me wrong, I like XMPP and IRC but for some people it's too far
away.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

I don't have much experience with WWW-based IM frontends,
so I will leave that for others; and I will explore the tangents
about alternatives for one-on-one chats instead. A bit off-topic,
but I'll write anyway, since it's quite some time now that
I have heard anyone mention these two...

On Wed, 1 Jun 2022, ffuentes wrote:

Jabber you need an account

Not necessarily if the ones you care about also have Google/Gmail account, since the old Google Talk XMPP <xmpps://talk.google.com:5223/> still exists (with catches, like no group chat there, and XMPP clients could
only send file to XMPP clients-- proprietary client and XMPP client
cannot send file to each other).

Granted, doing that would not solve the issues of decentralization
or Google-snoopery; but for some people, that would be a jump start
for using interoperable chat protocol, without having too much of
initial investment and barrier of lost contacts.

(And yes, Google Talk XMPP was my first experience in using Jabber protocol)

On the other hand, and especially for
less techy users (maybe out of reach for tildes but maybe in for open software) Discord or Telegram are attractive for being so visually
driven and easy to use, even across platforms.

In this topic, you forgot Delta Chat <https://delta.chat/>, which is basically an SMS thread-style view for an email inbox; with all of the email goodies
out of the box (interoperability, federation+decentralization,
per-post attachment, support for long posts, and data portability);
and of course, it's libre software.

Since the thread is tracked by using regular email headers,
the other party don't even have to use Delta Chat to reply;
regular email client also works-- just write reply in the same way
as writing a reply to a SMS conversation (quoteless, no letter formalities)
for optimal result.

(Though depending on the kind of inbox view the other party is using,
the inbox can look a bit cluttered; but this doesn't affect threaded view,
and making all Delta Chat messages go in in a dedicated folder
would help as well)

Note that I have not used Delta Chat myself (I'm not much of an IM person, especially *not* IM on PDA-style device) so I may not be privy of
quirks it might present in many kinds of usage, or how well it deals
with multiple-recipients or mailing list-based threads;
but here is what I gathered technically at least.

Regards,
~xwindows


P.S. And since it's using full MIME message header, the performance should be around the league of Matrix chat protocol, provided that both parties
are on the same server and IMAP push is being available (can be slower
if parties are on different email servers due to various delivery batching/scheduling policy that are used in the wild).

But the obvious upside is you are free to use any kind of regular
email servers/provider (including the provider/account you're already using,
or have been already paying for), which there are plenty of choices
since email has been around since forever.
--
xwindows' gallery of freely-licensed artworks
https://tilde.club/~xwindows/ http://tilde.club/~xwindows/ gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

One thing you could do is set up an IRC server, stand alone, no
federation, and a web interface for it. I'm doing that on campaignwiki.o
rg. See https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Chat for more.
Cheers
Alex
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

Alex Schroeder <alex@alexschroeder.ch> wrote:

One thing you could do is set up an IRC server, stand alone, no
federation, and a web interface for it. I'm doing that on campaignwiki.o
rg. See https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Chat for more.
Cheers
Alex
.

Oh hey, I believe I've stumbled across your site before
Alex (huge RPG nerd/fan here), your mapper tools are great.

As for discord alternatives, I've been looking into
Matrix-based chat clients, Element has, more or less,
all the stuff you expect from Discord, though some
bugs are still being ironed out (not that Discord
doesn't have a hive's worth of bugs of its own).
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

Oh hey, I believe I've stumbled across your site before
Alex (huge RPG nerd/fan here), your mapper tools are great.

Thanks! :)

As for discord alternatives, I've been looking into
Matrix-based chat clients, Element has, more or less,
all the stuff you expect from Discord, though some
bugs are still being ironed out (not that Discord
doesn't have a hive's worth of bugs of its own).

Have you tried hosting a Matrix server? I had heard so much bad stuff about
its resource requirements I never attempted to do it. My understanding was
also that you cannot ever delete stuff. All of that make me wary but then again, I haven’t tried.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

Alex Schroeder <kensanata@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

As for discord alternatives, I've been looking into
Matrix-based chat clients, Element has, more or less,
all the stuff you expect from Discord, though some
bugs are still being ironed out (not that Discord
doesn't have a hive's worth of bugs of its own).

Have you tried hosting a Matrix server? I had heard so much bad stuff about its resource requirements I never attempted to do it. My understanding was also that you cannot ever delete stuff. All of that make me wary but then again, I haven’t tried.
.

I haven't tried hosting myself yet, I just used the matrix.org server. There are, however, at least a couple matrix servers I've seen other than synapse (the one made by the Matrix Foundation).

As for deleting, its very much possible, just due to the way the protocol works, messages you write will be on every server that someone in the chat accessed that room from. It works a bit like Usenet, your client sends
your messages to your server you're logged into, the other people in the
room get your messages via them being pushed to /their/ servers, which
then send them to their clients.

The flip side of this is that you can control the degree of interaction
with other servers at not only the server level, but the room level as
well (i.e. setting a room to only joinable by people on a specific server)
(I think, I can't seem to find that again in a quick search, so that may
be a server only setting.) In that case, nothing ever goes to other
servers, just the one you're connected to.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2023-12-17, Alex Schroeder <kensanata@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

Have you tried hosting a Matrix server? I had heard so much bad stuff about its resource requirements I never attempted to do it. My understanding was also that you cannot ever delete stuff. All of that make me wary but then again, I haven???t tried.

I hosted a Matrix server for a short time. I think I have a writeup on
my gopher site. It wasn't too difficult to do, and while the resource requirements were higher than the cheapest Vultr VM had, it fit nicely
on the next level up, and nowadays that's the lowest level, so it may
work.

Why did I stop? Well I just didn't use it that much. I'm not a very big
discord user in the first place, and trying to convince folks to use
my weird, bespoke app was kind of a non-starter.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113